Wednesday, June 03, 2009

I wish to relate a story to illustrate some of my concern with an atheist committing violence.

When I was young, I was active in the Libertarian Party. I ended up spending months travelling across the state of Montana visiting with a fair number of people who called themselves Libertarians.

Because of the writings of Ayn Rand, many Libertarians were also atheists.

And some of them were frightening. They would, in fact, talk freely about acts of violence against their perceived enemies - against the state and, for some of them, against religion.

One person I remember showed me a shotgun he had made in his garage. We met him in a small town in western Montana where he showed up carrying a pair of revolvers that he carried around, like some cowboy out of a western movie. He bragged about his guns and showed us that they were real and that they were loaded.

The shotgun came out when he spoke about gun control. His rant included a comment about how he would use that home-made weapon if the government ever took away his pistols.

He held that the church was as evil as the state, and accepted all sorts of conspiracy theories about how church and state collude to control the people. He reported that he would have as little trouble walking into a church and killing the priest as he would walking into a courtroom and killing a judge.

I think about him, from time to time, as I write this blog.

As atheists convince more and more people to adopt atheism, their words are going to reach more and more people who are like this person that I met in Montana. People like this are not made evil by religion, or by the writings of Ayn Rand. They are mentally unbalanced to start with, and they then twist whatever philosophy that appeals to them into one that suits their interests.

Sooner or later, somebody like this, who has cultivated a sufficiently strong hatred of religion, will kill a priest just because he is a priest, or perhaps shoot up or blow up a whole congregation.

There is nothing about atheism that provides an automatic immunity against this type of behavior.

I can practically write the news reports and blog postings that will follow such an event. There will be a lot of theists with a lot of money and a huge audience who will write that "militant atheism" is responsible for this murder - that the "militant atheists" cultivated a culture of anti-theist hatreds that was certain to eventually lead to an act of violence such as this.

The bulk of the American public will believe this line of reasoning because they have been trained to believe it - because this line of reasoning has never been systematically challenged. Besides, the people who say it have a lot of money and a huge audience. Fox News will likely repeat the accusation for weeks.

I can practically write the postings of the atheists who will protest that this killing had nothing to do with 'militant' atheism - that atheists have not ever argued for the murder of priests and preachers or those who attend church. All we did was say that the world would be far better off without them, that they cost lives by interfering with scientific progress and blocking life-saving medical treatments, that they promote violence through their religion, and that it would be a good thing to rid the world of all religion.

I think about that man that I met in the mountains of Montana, and I make sure to include in virtually every post in which I am critical of religion the claim that the only legitimate response in an open society to words are words and private actions (non-violent actions that require no special justification such as deciding where to shop and who to vote for). Furthermore, in an open society, the only legitimate response to a political campaign is a counter-campaign.

I do this to hope to deter and delay, as much as possible, the violence that somebody such as that man in Montana might otherwise come to see as justified.

Furthermore, when writing about such things as the murder of a physician who provides abortions or the hijacking of airplanes and flying them into sky scrapers, I try to engage in some of this "doing unto others" business – or, in desire utilitarian terms – acting as of motivated by those desires that people generally have reason to promote as universal desires.

That man in Montana is probably now too old or too sick or too dead to do the types of things he said he would do. However, there is another man out there just like him that I have not personally met yet. The more popular atheism becomes, the more people like this there will be in the population of atheists.

It's worthwhile to keep these facts in mind, and to write accordingly.

13 comments:

"He held that the church was as evil as the state, and accepted all sorts of conspiracy theories about how church and state collude to control the people."

You can disagree with me about this matter(indeed, I encourage it!) but I just want to emphasize that this isn't a matter of tribalism for me that has something to do with atheist prejudice. I would similarly condemn atheists who spread such conspiracy theories in this scenario, just as I condemn those who have spread New World Order conspiracy theory despite them not having advocated for Timothy McVeight to go blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City. I also want to emphasize that I can condemn those persons for the content of their speech and what I perceive to be the consequences of the speech without believing their right to say such things should be abrogated.

When I get more time this evening I hope to respond to the other post.

These are all good points but it cannot be said that any significant segment of the freethought/rationalist community advocates violence in the name of ungod. We don't have anything like the 'Prayer and Action News' spurring Christian soldiers onward as to war. We don't have prominent irreligious figures praising vigilante murder, as the Baptists do. ( http://is.gd/NpA9 )

Damion, I'm not sure I would agree. She's not around anymore, but I think Ayn Rand really could count as one such figure. I dunno if you've read any of her stuff, but I've read Atlas Shrugged. First let me say I really enjoyed it, it is an awesome work of fiction IMHO. But it portrays all non-objectivists as sub-human leaches, it seems to delight in their deaths, and you get the distinct impression that killing them could be justified or even praised.

Damion wrote, "These are all good points but it cannot be said that any significant segment of the freethought/rationalist community advocates violence in the name of ungod."

This argument involves an equivocation on what we take the meaning of, "in the name of God/ungod" to be.

If you compare the proposition, "It is almost certainly the case that no God exists" to the proposition, "It is almost certainly the case that a God exists", neither proposition entails killing others.

One only gets to the conclusion that it is okay to kill others if one happens to add a bunch of other claims to the claim that, "It is almost certainly the case that a God exists" - attributing to that God certain properties and qualities that, then, lead to killing others.

But, we can go to that additional step with respect to the first propositin as well - adding all sorts of additional claims about the nature of a godless universe to get conclusions about the permissibility of killing.

It is only by comparing apples (the proposition "It is almost certainly the case that no God exists" alone) to oranges (the proposition, "It is almost certainly the case that a God exists" with all sorts of propositions that entail the legitimacy of killing) that one gets the conclusion that you defend here.

I am not sure you can compare atheism to religion, and a religious motivated murder to an atheistic one. Atheism provides no reasoning to kill religious people or anyone else. Many Religious scriptures provides numerous reasons to kill others. If a religion had a prohibition against killing, then it would be blameless if one of its worshipers committed murder. For example, if an adherent of Jainism goes on a shooting spree, we could never blame Jainism in the aftermath- its core position is non violence, therefore a Jainist murderer is a contradiction in terms. Not so for a Christian, Muslim, or Jew.

Unlike some religions, Atheism is not culpable in for the murder of a theist, because it is a scientific theory, asserting a quantitative proposition only. It is like blaming societies aggressive promotion of Heliocentric Theory if a Flat-Earther gets murdered by a Heliocentric Theorist.

I think this highlights the importance for atheists not to bundle Atheism with other propositions, such as pacifism vs justified violence, liberty vs security, capitalism vs socialism. Atheism only gets involved in these debates when someone is asserting a religious foundation for a proposition. It that case, it only addresses the the reasoning, not the outcome.

If you want to prevent atheist-on-theist violence, you have to promote a completely separate set of values irrespective of your position on the existence of God.

...attributing to that God certain properties and qualities that, then, lead to killing others.

Arguably, these properties are built-in to the most common conceptions of God, a fiction which is usually constructed on the basis of certain holy books. These books typically "add a bunch of other claims" such as "God is perfectly moral" and "God mandates killing apostates" in the course of fleshing out what the term "God" should be taken to mean.

By contrast, rationalists almost never add "all sorts of additional claims about the nature of a godless universe" which lead to such obviously ridiculous moral propositions. There is rather little consensus among unbelievers as to moral theories, but certainly they do not generally endorse the barbarism of the ancient religions.

As to Ayn Rand, I think it would be difficult to show how her idea of ethical egoism leads to anything like the sort of lawless vigilantism being openly advocated by extremists of the Abrahamic faiths. Self-interest and rational forethought dictates generally living at peace with one's neighbors unless and until they are initiating force against you.

As to Ayn Rand, I think it would be difficult to show how her idea of ethical egoism leads to anything like the sort of lawless vigilantism being openly advocated by extremists of the Abrahamic faiths. Self-interest and rational forethought dictates generally living at peace with one's neighbors unless and until they are initiating force against you.

You'd be surprised how broadly one can define "initiating force". Often being required to pay taxes is defined as initiating force.

As Hume said, the train scene is a very good example of this. Due to incompetance, a train full of innocent people smothered in a tunnel. The book then takes the extraordinary view that every person on the train deserved to die. It goes through a dozen of them as examples. One was a liberal professor that promoted socialist ideas, thus contributing to the incompetance that resulted in his death. Another (IIRC) was a woman who's crime was that she voted for the politicians currently in office, thuse contributing to the incompetance that resulted in her death. etc etc.

Basically what it boils down to is that anyone who isn't a Randian Objectivist deserves to die.

The imagry is evocative too... hundreds of people in a train smothered to death by smoke, deep in a tunnel. I can't imagine that she was intentionally evoking the image of a gas chamber, but could you get any closer?

But doesn't the definition of a god entail qualities about that god? Let me elaborate, a person could believe, it is almost certainly true that a god exists but because of that persons definition of a god, they would be lead to killing in his name.I understand that they would not literally be killing for god because their exists no known mechanism of actually receiving communication from an invisible/non-existent entity.However I still think that unless we give a definition of a god that is agreed upon in advance by all parties there will be contention over whether or not simply believing in that entity entails a possibility of committing violence. Simply stating that god means:1. supreme being that created the universe2. evolved super intelligence that created this universe3. wrathful entity that created the universe but was not created and wants the unbelievers killed.

While the first 2 are indeed benign and believing in them would not be a problem unless more beliefs are attached why are those 2 definitions the default for "it is almost certainly true that a god exists"? What definition of god do you use for that statement and why should that definition be accepted over others?

This is a problem with believing in things that do not actually have any corollary in the real world, they can mean whatever you want them to mean and thus the same statement uttered by different people can mean vastly different things.

Though I would like to mention that I agree whole heartedly with the message I think that this is an area which lacks clarity in your postings and some justification would be nice and would probably help many understand better.

One need not look to just Rand's fiction to find views justifying violence and/or atrocity.

Rand herself was a racist, at least in the case of native Americans. She stated that she believes the most unsympathetic Hollywood portrayal of Indians to be true and that because they didn't have the proper conception of property rights the "white man" had the right to conquer North America. If you go to some of the Ayn Rand insitutes on the web you can find articles saying such things as the Native American today should be grateful for what happened as a result of Old World colonization. Like this

The transfer of Western civilization to this continent was one of the great cultural gifts in recorded history, affording Indians almost effortless access to centuries of European accomplishments in philosophy, science, technology, and government. As a result, today's Indians enjoy a capacity for generating health, wealth, and happiness that their Stone Age ancestors could never have conceived.

From a historical perspective, the proper response to such a gift is not resentment but gratitude. America's policies toward the Indians were generally benign, aimed at protecting them from undeserved harm while providing significant material support and encouragement to become civilized.

About Me

When I was in high school, I decided that I wanted to leave the world better off than it would have been if I had not existed. This started a quest, through 12 years of college and on to today, to try to discover what a "better" world consists of. I have written a book describing that journey that you can find on my website. In this blog, I will keep track of the issues I have confronted since then.